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ML · Mali · –

Madina fire, 5 November 2026 Madina, Guemoukouraba

Burning · last detection 9 Nov 2026, 02:13 UTC

The fire started on 5 November 2026 in Madina, Mali, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,143 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

Number 157 in Mali in 2026, of 189.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in August 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

The power measured by the satellite is low (19.9 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Is it still active?

Satellites detected fire on 9 Nov 2026, 02:13 UTC. Everything suggests it is still burning. Satellites pass a few times a day and cloud or smoke can hide the fire: a lack of detections is not an official extinction. Each country’s emergency service declares a fire contained or out.

Burnt area
2,143ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
5 Nov 2026 – 9 Nov 2026
Municipalities hit
2
communes
Started on
5 Nov
2026
Heat detections
32
in a single hotspot: 20 MW
Danger at start
24
High · FWI index
Average daily power
59MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Nov9 Nov
9 Nov 2026

How it evolved, day by day

5 Nov 2026 · 0 MW · 0 6 Nov 2026 · 41 MW · 7 7 Nov 2026 · 69 MW · 11 8 Nov 2026 · 124 MW · 12 9 Nov 2026 · 1 MW · 2
5 Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 8 Nov 9 Nov

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

38°high
35km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone 7 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.4% of the area of London (21 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Madina where it started
    2,158 ha reached on 5 Nov
    0.4 %
  2. 0 ha
    0.0 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · forecast models, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
28 Oct 34.3 °C 21 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
29 Oct 34.3 °C 24 % 15 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
30 Oct 34.5 °C 33 % 19 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
31 Oct 31.0 °C 34 % 30 km/h 0.2 mm High 28
1 Nov 35.3 °C 23 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
2 Nov 35.5 °C 23 % 15 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
3 Nov 36.4 °C 23 % 18 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
4 Nov 32.7 °C 36 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
5 Nov 35.7 °C 25 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
6 Nov 37.9 °C 20 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
7 Nov 36.5 °C 20 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
8 Nov 35.0 °C 19 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 29 Oct 2026
After · 8 Nov 2026

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 30 October 2026 the air beside the fire reached 53 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 37: 2.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak53 µg/m³
Days over the guideline11 days
PM10235 µg/m³
Optical depth0.47
26 Oct29 Oct1 Nov4 Nov
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 32Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Mali

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Madina fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 5 November 2026 to 9 November 2026 (5 days). The perimeter dates it from 5 November 2026 to 8 November 2026.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,143 hectares (21.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Madina (2,158 ha, 0.4 %); Guemoukouraba (0 ha, 0.0 %).
Is the Madina fire still active?
Yes: satellites detected fire on 9 Nov 2026, 02:13 UTC. Check the emergency service for the official status.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 37.9 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Mali (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 7 November 2026.
  1. Page published (≈ 2,128 ha).

RSS Changes to this page With cross-checks and a citable version

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

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How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 5 November 2026 to 8 November 2026. 32 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: ECMWF IFS model, provisional until the ERA5 reanalysis arrives.

How we build fire pages: methodology

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.